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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25397950">Your Breath Is My Breath</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellicit/pseuds/monday_excarnate'>monday_excarnate (Ellicit)</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/poodlepaws'>poodlepaws (Nausicaa_E)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(kinda sorta) - Freeform, Consensual Mind Control, Domesticity, Exhibitionism, F/F, Folklore References, Forced Orgasm, Human/Monster Romance, Humiliation, Married Sex, Orgasm Control, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Oviposition, POV Second Person, Porn with Feelings, Pregnancy, Prostate Stimulation, Sea Monsters, Sharing a Brain, Tentacle Monsters, Tentacle Sex, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Unconventional Pregnancy, Water Sex, also the sea monster is a big gay lesbian dork, fun with formatting, lesbian wedding, listen it's got a trans girl POV character and it's about oviposition. the genders are gonna happen, non-human biology, or rather a detailed telepathic fantasy thereof, references to past gender dysphoria</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:15:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,626</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25397950</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellicit/pseuds/monday_excarnate, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/poodlepaws</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Motherhood As Befits the Monstrous; </p><p>or, In Which a Woman's New Bride Is More Than She Thought She Would Be, and Offers Her Wonder and Glory As She Had Only Imagined Beforehand, and Both Are Brought to Great Joy in the Consummation Of It; </p><p>or, Emily Panindagat's Wife Fills Her With More Tentacles Than She Had Heretofore Believed Possible.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Trans woman / tentacle monster</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. the ocean inside and outside you</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>You and Mel had settled on a spring wedding – the night of April 30th, which you joked was because it was the best night for witches and which Mel joked was because she wanted to be unionized in time for May Day. There’ve been great storms recently, of the kind that the two of you will always associate with the first spring you’d been dating, and the time you’d come home from the theater only to get soaked to the bone running to your apartment door, and you’d torn off each other’s clothes then and there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The weather promises to be clear enough for the wedding, though, and the majority of the electricity in the air is just between the two of you. You’re holding it in a public park overlooking the ocean, sprays of flowers matching the rainbow ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Your small circle of friends clusters into folding chairs, instructed to dress <em>fancy</em> rather than <em>formal</em>, and you’re happy to see a wedding party looking more like a comics convention than a formal occasion. You’d been joking and silly the morning of about the extra bad luck of seeing the bride before the wedding because if you saw your bride that means she was also seeing <em>her</em> bride, and the well-wishes make your heart swell, but all your good humor and excitement turns to snotty, happy-overwhelmed tears as you make your way forward, and then to joint bawling as you catch sight of Mel in her green glittery suit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once the tears settle down, your best friend Dante starts reading, calling on the favor of any passing gods and the power of the state of Oregon to bless and sanctify this marriage, and helps wind the ribbons around your joined hands. Then they clear their throat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Melusine Morgen. Do you come to this place of your own free will, wholeheartedly and without coercion?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her voice barely trembles despite the tear tracks still present on her cheeks. “I do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Emily Panindagat. Do you come to this place of your own free will, wholeheartedly and without coercion?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I do.” You swallow, your heart pounding in joy and just a little of the terror that any major life event inspires.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then, with sky and sea and all those gathered here as witness, make your vows.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You and your almost-wife take a deep breath in unison. Mel had told you that the words you’re about to speak were traditional in her family, and you’d had a few suggestions of your own, like saying them in English instead of the original Breton, mostly for the sake of the guests.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Your breath is my breath.” Your voices twine together, hers a smooth contralto, yours just a bit lower. “Your blood is my blood, your heart my heart. Your life is my life, now and until the stars fall.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then I now pronounce you wife and wife. The brides may fuckin’ <em>GET IT</em>!!” Dante breaks out in a wide grin, formality cast aside as joyfully as any bridal bouquet, and Mel dips you to the opening notes of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and the groans and boos of guests successfully pranked.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The wedding party is a modest and comfortable success. The sun reddens the Pacific as you joke and dance and cry and feast, and joy is unconfined. When you begin to flag, your friends absolutely refuse to let you help clean up, and instead bundle you into Mel’s Subaru, cans clanking behind it, and you roar down Highway 101 blaring queer pop and singing as your hearts overflow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mel bridal-carries you over the threshold of the beach house you’ve rented for the honeymoon, and you shriek in delight as she half-hurls you onto the couch. You twine over each other, content in the knowledge that you have absolutely no commitments right now beyond the lifelong one you just made. There’s kissing and cuddling and some wiggling out of fancy clothes, but you’re both too full of food and emotions to do much before you fall asleep in the warmth of the shared thought: <em>I have a wife!</em></span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You wake again at midnight, arms empty. Mel is not in the house, but you do not – cannot? – panic, and a turn of the head reveals her footprints in the sand outside the window, plain in the moonlight. Still sleepy, you open the door and walk out, following her footprints, and your brain is still swimming too deeply in dark warmth to be surprised to see her standing at the water’s edge.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mel?” you call softly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She turns, and the smile on her face is identical to the way she smiled when you proposed, when she asked you to move in with her and you said <em>yes, please</em>, when the two of you by pure happenstance reached for the same book on the library display and ended up talking about your mutual love for the author rather than arguing: a pure, uncomplicated, joyful thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You meant it, when you said your heart would be my heart,” she says, just barely audible over the roaring of the waves. “I could feel how much you meant it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your heart lurches, and you climb a little more to wakefulness. That slow falling sensation is something Mel has been able to make you feel over and over again, every time she looks you in the eyes or strokes your hair and tells you how much she loves you, and it tugs on you now like the gravity of a sun. “Of – of course, love!” you stammer. You can’t help but take her hand when she holds it out to you, and she leads you deeper into the surf. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The cold shocks you fully awake. The sand shifts and squishes between your bare toes, the water curls around your thighs as gently as your lover’s, your <em>wife’s</em>, caresses, and at last you notice: the sky is unusually clear, but there is a dark, starless shape growing on the horizon behind her. She pulls you to her chest and whispers in your ear. “And you’re ready to see just how much that means, aren’t you, darling? You’re ready to see <em>all</em> of me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Is the drumming noise in your ears the ocean or your own blood? Your usual bravura is gone. In the daylight, you could make some crack about how you’ve already seen a lot of her – right here, right now, you cannot doubt for a moment that the woman you married is the tip of an iceberg. Your “yes” is barely a whisper.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She kisses you. Your eyes flutter closed, and when they open, it’s as if they’ve been replaced with newer, better ones.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The dark shape on the horizon isn’t just a cloud, an indistinct mass. It’s closer than you thought, vast and glowing, fluorescing faintly green and purple and blue. It’s looming over your wife, and when she speaks, it speaks with her through a buzzing, inhuman mouth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This is me, darling.” She strokes your cheek. Something smooth and dripping wet and muscular loops around your wrist. “This is me, and it’s our wedding night, and you meant what you said, and I… I have a present for you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“W-what <em>are</em> you?” Your tone is equal parts wonder and fear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She / it / they hum in consideration, and it reverberates through your sternum. “There are more things in heaven and on earth… <em>Arragouset</em> is not, perhaps, quite correct, but similar enough in the broad strokes. I am a dweller in the deeps. I am one who loves. I am your wife, and her wife, and her wife before that. And I would make good on the vows I took, an you will have me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You look up at the arragouset and take in the shape of it, and see in its many small and glowing eyes the same pure joy as in your wife’s eyes – though how you could call it “uncomplicated” now baffles you, since that joy is rich with a thousand complexities, bubbling forth like minerals from an undersea vent. You see Mel smile at you, and your gut twists with the sudden recognition that you have a <em>tentacle</em> around your wrist. You had barely imagined that your dream of having and being a wife would come true, and now <em>this</em> dream is coming true as well… “Yes,” and your throat catches, grasping for a title to follow it up with.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Your love,” your wife finishes gently with all its mouths.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My love,” you repeat, in the obedient tone you’ve had years to practice. You incline your head and lean it against her chest. “I’m yours.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>More tentacles wrap around your legs, around your waist, around your arms. They carry you deeper, closer to the bulk of her, until it looms above you and you gasp quietly all over again as your perception adjusts. The body-that-was-Mel looks somehow blurred, now, as though the edges are softening and fading into the writhing mass behind it, and you feel yourself blurring with it. Tension slowly seeps out of you as you relax into the strength of your wife’s tentacles, and your eyelids drift down. You are so small next to it, so helpless, so complete in your trust. You are sinking and you do not want it to stop.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A thought finally makes its way to your mouth, and you mumble, “Is this the whole present?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, darling,” your arragouset spouse laughs, “I’m only just getting started.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something small and thin and writhing is making its way up your spine. Another tentacle, you assume.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your love purrs, as its human-seeming part brushes a hand against your cheek, “Relax, my sweet, my wife. Soon we won’t need these inelegant, single-throated songs.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A sharp pain. The tip of the writhing thing, you realize, has parted the flesh at the base of your neck. Pain – and pleasure – signals from nerves stimulated in entirely novel ways flood your body, your mind, and a vision floats before your mind’s eye of one of Melusine’s (for this <em>is</em> your wife, monster though it may be, and the name you knew it by seems not entirely inappropriate still) thinnest limbs curling around, through, your vertebrae and up towards your brain stem.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You moan, lightning sparking along your spine. Something clicks and catches, and you clutch at the tentacles before you, holding them tightly lest you drift away entirely. You can’t help but feel that this is <em>right</em> – Mel already occupies your thoughts so often. It seems a natural extension. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tentacle writhes against the inside of your skull, wrapping around the stem, growing and splitting into more and more threads, braiding itself into your various lobes – occipital, parietal, temporal, moving inexorably forwards. You hazily remember that there is nothing in the brain that could feel touch, so your wife must be creating that wonderful, impossible, pulsing sensation for you, and your gratitude knows no bounds.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>There,</em> it says, and you hear it deep inside you, no need for the crude shapings of gas or liquid, and you know more intimately now the delight and hint of smugness you remember from every project Melusine ever solved a problem for. <em>My flesh is your flesh, your mind my mind.</em>
</p><p>
  <span>You try to move your limbs, just to test your love’s true strength.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You can’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not merely that it has you held tightly; you try, and something catches the impulse, and your limbs do not respond.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your heart lurches in welcome fear at the realization that you are entirely at the mercy of an inhuman creature, mixed with your overwhelming trust in that mercy. You could hang in this net forever, happy to let those emotions spiral around each other, were it not for how your wife’s power over you makes your heart pound, your cheeks flush, your cock stiffen and twitch… your want is deeper now than it ever has been, commensurate with how Melusine has more power over you now than any time you had previously played at submission, and there is no hiding it, not from the being woven so delicately into your mind.</span>
</p><p>
You don’t even need to ask <em>please</em>.
</p><p>
  <span>It holds you like a doll (exactly the way you always wanted to be held while privately mourning the two-inch height difference between yourself and Melusine’s human semblance) and teases apart the hooks of your bra. A tingle runs down your spine, as though you would shiver were it not that every twitch and breath you take is entirely controlled (and that sends yet another tingle down your spine to reinforce the first), and your nipples harden. Two tendrils, cold and still wet with ocean, wrap around them and tug gently. Your mouth opens soundlessly. Your eyes do not, cannot close. Melusine, you can feel, wants you to see every last detail of this glorious consummation, and is overjoyed to no longer be limited by the unconscious impulses of the human body. Arousal curls in your belly – it knows that your instinct is to close your eyes when overwhelmed, and if you could now you would. The prospect threatens to be too much, and your vision swims – and then stabilizes. Low waves of relaxation flood through you from your wife, and all those feelings too big for your body alone are dissipated through Melusine’s.</span>
</p><p>
Had it spoken with words, you would have barely noticed, but with its mind laced in yours like held hands, the thought pushes aside everything else. <em>You told me you wanted to be a mother, my darling, my love. I held you and wiped your tears. Will you forgive me for keeping this a surprise?</em>
</p><p>
  <span>You’re a welter of emotions, but the impending satisfaction of that aching want – to nurture children inside you, <em>Melusine’s</em> children no less – overrides them all. <em>You never lied, my love</em>, you think. <em>You always said, “Maybe, someday.” It’s someday: how can I not forgive you?</em>
</span></p><p>
  <span>The yawning gap in your wife’s visage, the restless twining of its tentacles, might be mistaken by an outsider for a threat. You recognize in it the dancing smile as its joy floods you and happy tears (yours and its both) roll down your cheeks, the ocean inside you mixing with the ocean outside of you on your lips.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tentacles on your nipples are still rolling, twisting, providing a constant ebb and flow of stimulation that has you rock hard and your muscles twitching and clenching. Another pair pull down your panties, but leave your garter belt and stockings. Melusine <em>did</em> always like dressing you up, you think wryly, and you feel an answering pulse of agreement/amusement curl through the base of your skull, and you feel so <em>small</em> inside that amusement, and you are glad that at last Melusine is as big as you think of it in your heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Melusine pulls you closer to it still, too close to read any kind of physical expression – but there is no need for that, you remember all over again with a thrill half excitement and half relief. More and more of its limbs wrap around you, stroking and caressing and pulsing, gripping and letting go; you’ll be surprised if there aren’t marks left on your skin, and <em>that</em> thought sends yet another electric-eel-pulse of an aborted shiver down your spine. The pride and shame of being marked – of showing to those with eyes to see that you are owned, that you obey and are loved for it – rushes through you, and mixes with the fear and wonder of whether your wife will leave any comprehensible marks at all. A hickey you could joke about, a day collar you could be sly about – the prints of the tentacles spiraling about you would make you a <em>curiosity</em>, and your cheeks flush under gazes both imagined and real.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your body beyond your control, you have only your thoughts as you are moved closer, and closer, and closer, until you’re being clasped against your wife’s scales and then pulled down into the rushing waves. You gasp for a moment, atavistic panic surfacing and then soothed away by the flexing and fluttering inside your skull and by the insistent press of more tentacles into your mouth and nose. You feel just a little lightheaded, but your chest still rises and falls despite the ever-increasing weight of the water around you.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Your breath is my breath, and my breath is yours.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You whine in agreement; or you would, if you had any oxygen to spare and if your throat was not currently occupied in squeezing and contracting around your wife (and oh, you can feel how that makes it shiver in delight).</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Let me open you up, my love. My eggs  – our eggs – are not precisely… small.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>New images flood your mind at that; the half-hoped-for possibility now a certainty. You half-see your belly growing swollen, then lumpy, gravid with life that should not be there and is all the more lovely for it. You’d dreamed of true pregnancy, of course, but the idea of carrying eggs carries its own dangerous allure – the certainty of life within you as they are implanted, the knowledge they belong to some greater and more powerful being, the knowledge that you can carry life within you even as you are, the sheer weight and stretch of them… You can’t tell if these images come from your mind alone, or whether Melusine is drawing these visions out, or projecting its experiences of brides who came before … and as you think of the <em>weight</em> of its – <em>your</em> – eggs the thought comes upon you in force (and perhaps the tentacles press harder on you, or perhaps it is the sea), and as you cannot cry out your mind simply goes quieter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your legs open, slowly, and you cannot tell whether the first command came from you or the monster you’ve joined yourself to, and you clench in arousal because in truth it does not matter. You are open, exposed, held by your wife and the ocean both, in perfect position for Melusine to circle your anus with a distinctly slipperier tentacle, teasing you until you flex and stretch and clench and look at your wife with pleading in your eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It laughs silently and pushes into you, barely stretching at first, but only getting wider as it goes deeper, writhing and squirming in a way that feels like it’s hitting every nerve possible. If you’d tried this before, it would have been far, far too much; but the tendrils inside your skull flex and every twinge of pain is dulled just enough and every shock of pleasure redirected so that it builds and carries you upwards rather than drowning you. The tentacle in your throat writhes, too, and you weakly wrap your tongue around as much of it as you can, rewarded by how you feel Melusine’s pleasure in time with your work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You don’t know how long you spend like this, impaled and filled in practically every way possible, but eventually Melusine begins to pull out of you, inch by inch. You pout at the loss of fullness at first, and then the scales against which you are pressed begin to open and blossom like a time lapse of either a terrestrial or oceanic anemone. Melusine positions you against it, and without warning you <em>know</em> that this is its ovipositor. Your heart jumps with surprise and sudden need, fiercer than you had thought possible.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re so beautiful like this, my pretty girl. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The petal-esque, almost labial folds of flesh wrap around your cock, your ass, everything in between, and squeeze, and <em>catch</em>. Small barbs sink into your flesh. You find yourself suddenly able to move, and you breathe out slowly and heavily, small bubbles escaping the otherwise nigh-perfect seal of your lips around your wife. You know this game. If you have any kind of control, it’s because your wife wants you to struggle, to thrash and pull against it and cement in your mind just how small you are allowed, wanted, needed to be; to grind against it and make it feel more of those same jolts of pleasure-pain you can feel it harvesting from your consciousness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You comply. You feel the little pinpricks of the hooks caught in your flesh, the strength of the tentacles around you. Even knowing the game you are shocked at how little it needs its tendrils inside your mind. You are anchored like a mussel to a rock, unable to move away from the ovipositor, and by struggling you merely work your arousal higher as the barbs twist and tug and hold you. Tight against its scales, you can feel the pulse of its heart (hearts?) like the tide, but quickening, and you know that you are wanted even though, <em>because</em>, you are helpless, clinging to your wife. It is your anchor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The ovipositor ripples gently against your cock and tugs your ass open just a bit wider, and then you feel something smooth and firm – several somethings – press into you, propelled by the same peristaltic contractions slowly bringing you to the edge. The eggshells are more like rubber or flesh than rock, and if there was only one at a time, you think you might have barely felt it, after your wife’s preparations; but they come in twos and threes, and the light stretch is magnified a thousand fold by Melusine’s delicate touches to your perception until it overwhelms you.</span>
</p><p><span>Thoughts and feelings come out of you in a rush, faster than words – a mess of gratitude and ecstasy and a deep, hollow desire for more. A gentle writhing starts up inside you, and you can barely form a wordless query, answered by an image of a thin, suckered tentacle emerging from just inside the ovipositor, pushing and pulling the eggs along, separating the groups and lining them up single-file inside you. Each clutch slides over your prostate, one after another sending p u l s e s through your nerves, each blanking out</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">your thoughts with the sheer awareness of your body’s euphoria. In those      b l a n k</span><br/>
<span>spots you       feel your wife’s             mind</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">against you more     strongly around the</span><br/>
<span>edges, wrapping a r o u n d</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">you; you are a small            bright spot of pleasure in the</span><br/>
<span class="tab3">vast <b>dark</b> sea of its</span><br/>
<span class="tab4">perception. Your body</span><br/>
<span>s<em>h</em>a<em>k</em>e<em>s</em></span><br/>
<span class="tab3">with the force of it, each egg passing t h r o u g h you carrying with it all</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">the love and life and praise</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">and helplessness and promises of the future</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">and deep, true joy that wipes all thoughts from your body and you</span><br/>
<span class="tab3">rise</span><br/>
<span class="tab3">to the crest of that wave</span><br/>
<span class="tab3">and</span></p><p> </p><p>s t o p</p><p> </p><p><span>held on the precipice</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">not</span><br/>
<span class="tab4">allowed</span><br/>
<span class="tab5">to</span><br/>
<span>fall, the pleasure almost</span><br/>
<span>painful</span><br/>
<span>and the pain</span><br/>
<span>pleasurable</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">a continuous</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">lightning bolt</span><br/>
<span>that short-circuits your memory</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">and turns your vision</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">black and white;</span><br/>
<span class="tab3">you know your eyes</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">are open but</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">you can’t see</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">can’t  t h i n k</span><br/>
<span>and you want, oh, you want so much.</span></p><p><span>it’s torture of the sweetest kind.</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">endless</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">loving</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">and then</span><br/>
<span class="tab1">melusine</span><br/>
<span class="tab2">lets</span></p><p class="tab2">you</p><p>go.</p><p> </p><p>and you fall.</p><p> </p><p>And then you are floating, slowly, held by the sea and by your sea-wife, warmth and love and afterglow washing over you, the eggs heavy in you heavy in Melusine’s limbs. It strokes your hair, crooning to you in a low hum that surrounds you and turns all your previously tensed muscles to liquid.</p><p>
  <em>Once you warm them up for me, they’ll attach themselves to you. Oh, my love, you’ll be such a perfect home for our children.</em>
</p><p>You can’t tell if you’re crying, underwater, but the compliment comes with your wife’s pride and your pride and the fulfillment of a dream thought impossible and visions of eggs heavy inside you. Your body still twitches, overwhelmingly sleepy and content; you run your hands, still twined with your love’s various limbs, down your abdomen and shiver to feel the distinct shapes of the eggs inside you when you press.</p><p>
  <em>They’ll grow slowly. They need time to feed, and to learn from us both.</em>
</p><p>You have just enough mind present to know a perfect set-up when you see one. <em>Oh? Just how many am I eating for?</em></p><p>A slow writhing and slipping out of you, and you realize that your wife is actually taking the time to count. <em>Mmmm, about a hundred… so let’s say… 101 Eldritch Abominations.</em></p><p>Your wife’s sense of humor is still terrible.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thanks to Hazel from the Sapphic Teratophilia discord for coming up with the novel ovipositor configuration!</p><p><a href="https://abookofcreatures.com/2015/04/01/arragouset/">Arragouset</a> are not, in the lore, terribly similar physically to Melusine; but the aquatic origins and devotion to their spouses seemed appropriate enough.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. bad jokes and sashimi</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>You don’t remember returning to shore, or even falling asleep; but you must have at some point, because you wake to sunlight streaming through the open curtains above your bed. The way this always went in the stories you read, you’d have a brief moment where you got to think it was all a dream, and then you’d feel its reality all at once.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That’s not what happens. You know it was no dream. You’re aware of your wife’s true, monstrous form in the water outside your door, of the soft, round eggs inside your gut, and of your wife’s thoughts entwined in yours. You bite your lip, face growing hot as you turn that over in your head, and as you push yourself up into a sitting position with one arm, the other heads between your legs instead of for your phone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Melusine notices.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh, do wait for me, darling,</span>
  </em>
  <span> it purrs into your head. Your hand freezes inches away from your cock, as does the rest of you. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’ve almost got breakfast ready, and then I’ll be able to use this body to watch from both angles at once.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, my love,” you whimper, the metaphorical floor pulled out from under you. Melusine’s control relaxes, and you flip over and groan into a pillow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The bedroom door swings back open, and your wife enters, its human guise seeming subtly off; she notices you noticing, and its features shift. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Still rebuilding from last night, love. I appreciate your eyes. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It holds a tray loaded with crêpes (jam-packed with preserves for you, salmon-cream-cheese-smeared for her, although there’s always the customary mutual food-stealing), sausage, juice, milk, and your pillbox. It props the tray on your lap, then carefully climbs into bed with you, projecting love, smug satisfaction, and a deliberate unwillingness to care about getting crumbs on the sheets.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>“Go on, darling,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> she says both ways at once, and the effect is just disorienting enough that its human body frowns slightly before tilting its head and smirking. “You can tease yourself while I enjoy breakfast and your crêpes get cold, or you can have some patience, eat now, and let me use this mouth on you when you’re done.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You flush and cram a crêpe into your mouth, and then realize that shutting yourself up isn’t going to be a defense anymore, and whine a little through your full mouth. Melusine smiles again and strokes your hair while it sees to feeding its own body.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Breakfast is delicious, and the first bites of food awaken a growling hunger. You </span>
  <em>
    <span>are </span>
  </em>
  <span>eating for a hundred and one, now, and Melusine’s crêpe skills are well-practiced. The thought rises into your head—</span>
  <em>
    <span>How does a sea monster learn how to make crêpes, anyway?</span>
  </em>
  <span>, with the undercurrent of </span>
  <em>
    <span>How much of your past was a lie?</span>
  </em>
  <span>—and then you realize the two of you can talk with your mouths full now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your wife hums consideringly. </span>
  <em>
    <span>The lie was… mostly in the timing, and even then, I have been for all practical purposes human for longer than you’ve known me. I keep my wives </span>
  </em>
  <span>very</span>
  <em>
    <span> close to my heart, every single day.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You lean over and kiss it on the chest, and say, “Glad to be here.” Resuming your breakfast, you think, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Are you immortal, then?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>No, just very long-lived. Not much point in reproducing otherwise.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Should’ve guessed! </span>
  </em>
  <span>That said, you know enough about biology to be puzzled. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Long-lived </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>lay a hundred eggs at a time? Why isn’t the sea full of arragousets?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>The sea is a dangerous place for hatchlings, my love, and we can’t protect them all, only give them as best a start as possible. They don’t really gain much self-awareness until their first molt, anyway. And the ones that do survive will have much of our memories to guide them—remember how I told you they needed time to learn?</span>
  </em>
  <span> Your wife swallows her current bite and plants a kiss on your cheek.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>So we don’t get to … keep them? </span>
  </em>
  <span>That tugs at your heart, and not in a good way. Of course you know you don’t get to keep any children, in the end, but you’re used to the model where you take care of your kids for eighteen years.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>They don’t need us to, love. They’ll have us in their heads to guide them; really, in some ways it’s a much more efficient process. And the ones that survive will come back every so often, at least until they get too big. I’d be thinking about introducing you to my mother if she hadn’t passed on, oh, fifty-odd years ago.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>For a moment I thought you were going to say she was just homophobic</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your wife nearly chokes and has to make its body breathe deeply for a few seconds. Eventually the coughing and wheezing turns into laughter—apparently being able to read your mind doesn’t mean you can’t still surprise it with humor once in a while. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Let’s stop talking about my mother. I believe I made you a promise… </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You tense up and wolf down the last sausage, and, still silly, can’t keep the implied pun out of your head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Melusine can, though.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It sweeps everything smoothly on to the tray and, subsequently, the floor. Your hands, meanwhile, fly up to grip the headboard—you would say entirely of their own volition, but the will involved is very much your wife’s. You find yourself unable to move much otherwise as your love’s human semblance pulls the covers off of you, revealing your already stiffening cock. You’re not used to being quite so hard with so little foreplay. You can probably blame your wife for that as well, in more ways than </span>
  <span>one. It’s another iteration of the game you played last night—a way for Melusine to demonstrate the extent of its control, and while it wrapped its tendrils around your brainstem and pulled to make you hard, the knowledge of its control alone keeps you there. Your ears burn, and you wriggle your hips, gently, looking at your wife with anticipation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your wife’s smile is predatory. A shiver runs down your spine as you recall the barbs, the sharp scales of last night. She could take you to pieces, she could tear you apart if she thought it best, and you would thank her for every cut and pull. But instead her human form merely opens its mouth and—oh. You stare in awed fascination and desperate arousal as its tongue dips down to lick the tip of your cock from at least a handsbreadth away.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>It’s so nice to be able to show off for you, love</span>
  </em>
  <span> echoes in your head, and </span>
  <em>
    <span>oh.</span>
  </em>
  <span> You hadn’t even considered that your wife would be able to tease you while its mouth was otherwise occupied now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Its tongue keeps going. You moan loudly, as much from the sight as from the sensation, as it spirals down and around you and then begins to pulse, your wife still grinning like a shark that’s just found a whole school of fish. It squeezes and pulls, slick with something that dries slower than spit, and so there’s no irritation, no friction, just smooth pressure that makes your arousal climb higher. Her tentacle—that’s what’s spilling out of her mouth, and you can’t believe how lucky you are that this isn’t a dream—flutters so as to just offset the spasms of your hips, and it keeps </span>
  <em>
    <span>going</span>
  </em>
  <span>, flicking over your perineum in a way that makes you clench and gasp.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Darling, you’re absolutely delicious,</span>
  </em>
  <span> your wife growls, and you feel a faint echo of its own arousal and desire laced through the words—faint, and yet still enough to make you keen at a pitch higher than you thought yourself capable of.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You also reach the edge faster than you thought yourself capable of. For a moment you can </span>
  <em>
    <span>feel</span>
  </em>
  <span> your wife considering whether to hold you there, and you gasp, thinking </span>
  <em>
    <span>please</span>
  </em>
  <span> so loudly you almost think you might have actually said it aloud, and she laughs (sending another vibration through your cock) and lets you spasm and thrust and watch the constellations behind your eyelids as you cum. It’s nice. It’s not earth-shattering, the way it was last night, but you think you’re alright with that; there’s a pleasant sort of sleepiness that washes over you afterwards, and you remember delightedly that you really could spend all day in bed if you wanted to.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Besides,</span>
  </em>
  <span> your wife adds, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I don’t need to spend all those hours teasing you to turn you into a dripping mess anymore. I’ll still do it for fun, but all I haaaaaaaave to do is pulse just so inside your head and you’re right there again, so there’s no harm in letting you—or making you—cum just a little more frequently.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Which god,” you pant, “heard my prayer and gave me you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Melusine rises from the bed to take the tray to the sink, and pauses. She grins. “Me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You spend a cozy week in your honeymoon house, reading or watching TV together, exploring the beach town, and exploring the water beyond. Melusine slips into your nose and throat and breathes the water for you, and you swim alongside it, anchored to its leviathan form and seeing the ocean through its countless eyes and tasting the chemicals you swim in. It does its best to convey the sensations from its lateral lines, the three-dimensional world of electric motion, but you struggle with it—though it hardly matters. It’s enough to see the ocean as a native, to have married its daughter and been welcomed home.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The first thing you really do when you get back into the city is have Dante over.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So Mel’s a sea monster,” you say over the sanbeiji they’ve commandeered your kitchen to make.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, she’s made a fursona?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I mean. She’s literally a huge sea monster.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mel grins and flutters her fingers. “Mhm! Biological puppet of a huge aquatic being here.” She shows off her tongue.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“... Yeah, okay, I’ve seen ghosts.” There’s a brief pause; they don’t elaborate. “Thanks for telling me, I guess?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And, uh. I’m pregnant. Sort of.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Emily Panindagat, did you get oviposited?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mel cackles. You flush. “Shut up!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dante grins like a Cheshire cat. “No.” You make an exaggerated pout, and they reach over to hug you. “Em, I’m incredibly happy for you, just … this is the single most in-character thing to have happened to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>FINE</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” you huff, failing to suppress a giggle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So when do I get to meet my adorabloodthirsty aquatic niephews?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mel shrugs. “When they’re ready. It varies.” An image pops into your head of your belly swollen with eggs beyond any normal human proportions, your children so reluctant to leave that you’re immobile under the weight of them, and you rub your legs together under the table.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Love! </span>
  </em>
  <span>you think. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Don’t make me horny in front of my best friend!</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>That’s all you, dear. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Melusine deals with this in a manner you’re now realizing is going to be typical, and simply stops the arousal in your brain. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’ll save that thought for later, though … </span>
  </em>
  <span>She continues in her human voice, “You probably won’t want to be there at the hatching; it’s … markedly unpleasant.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They’re, um. Aquatic, anyway,” you say. “Mel’s species is r-selected, they’re not … people until they’ve molted a while.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh my </span>
  <em>
    <span>god</span>
  </em>
  <span>, you fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>dork</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Dante says, and launches into ribbing you for being able to remember the difference between r- and K-selection, and the rest of the evening is mercifully human. Dante congratulates you again, and promises to help throw you the “wettest” baby shower, and then you have to watch the </span>
  <em>
    <span>fucking </span>
  </em>
  <a href="https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/a-very-creepy-magic-bullet-blender-commercial/83377648/">
    <span>baby bullet video</span>
  </a>
  <span> again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You fall asleep that night in Melusine’s arms. It gently rubs your belly, and you can just make out the distinct shapes of the eggs you carry inside you. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’m going to be a mother</span>
  </em>
  <span>, you think, and you have no choice but to believe it as you sink into Melusine’s huge, comforting dreams.</span>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <span>The eggs grow inside you, steadily. For the first month or two, you don’t notice the gradual swelling of your belly, but every morning getting out of bed feels an ounce harder, and all of a sudden one morning your shirt is too small to fully cover you. When you turn and look at your profile in the mirror, you are visibly, unmistakably, pregnant.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s not long after that that there are questions at work. You tend to duck your head and stammer when asked about how—you feel a strange mix of shame and validation when your coworker Sarah asks how you and Mel found a donor, half pleased they think you could carry a human child and half embarrassed at your circumspection about being trans. Melusine takes over for you, using your mouth to spin some tale about a local fertility clinic, and your ears grow hot knowing that it’s controlling you in front of someone else. (</span>
  <em>
    <span>I’ll save that for later</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Melusine says inside you, and you almost squeak out loud.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>People offer you belly rubs, half out of altruism and half out of the infinite curiosity that nascent life engenders, and you always tear up a little. You’d dreamed it might be you in that situation, but you’d barely imagined it would happen in the waking world. Your joy is mixed, to some extent, with fear—</span>
  <em>
    <span>what if they feel the lumps? What if they figure it out, if they know that I’m letting a monster use me like this?</span>
  </em>
  <span>—and it’s that feeling of falling, slow and gentle but still present, and it’s so much more than you’d ever expected motherhood could be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The questions keep coming. Some of them you can answer quickly, noncommittally. Morning sickness is “manageable” (read: nonexistent, since your body isn’t producing the same sorts of hormones). Your appetite is truly voracious, and you have to balance your overwhelming desire for sashimi with your awareness of the risks (you suppose baby arragousets don’t have problems with raw fish, but humans are a different matter). Your feet and back don’t hurt yet, and Mel’s great with massages, but it is annoying the way you’re having to change your wardrobe.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Some you can answer queerly, jokingly. Someone asks if the baby’s a boy or a girl, and it’s—well, as original as you guess an idea </span>
  <em>
    <span>can </span>
  </em>
  <span>be for you these days; the thought that Mel could be subtly changing the way you think sends </span>
  <em>
    <span>several </span>
  </em>
  <span>shivers down your spine—the point is that you say “a little monster, and we’ll love them to bits,” and all of a sudden you have </span>
  <em>
    <span>power</span>
  </em>
  <span> here, and you’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>secure </span>
  </em>
  <span>in your role. (Melusine picks up on </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and floods you with pride—</span>
  <em>
    <span>Good incubator!</span>
  </em>
  <span>) Someone else asks if you’ve thought of names, and it’s purely a human instinct that makes you say “this is a queer household, they’ll choose their own when they’re old enough.” (Dante, hearing the anecdote, says “a young sea monster swims alone in their spawning pool” and you lovingly threaten to kill them.)</span>
</p><p><span>And some questions are hard. “How’s your mood?” is surprisingly difficult—Mel’s got the reins to your head, so there’s no irritability, no sudden melancholy, only steadily growing joy and a sleepy benignity (and a chafing, constant, low-grade horniness, as the eggs rub inside you). You’re not sure what to do with the surprise when you say “nice and steady, actually”, other than to feel gratitude and hear the answering </span><em><span>You’re welcome</span></em><span> in your head.</span> <span>“When’s the baby due?” is worse—you’re not great at answering that one noncommittally, other than to pretend it’s a standard nine-month gestation and say “early next year”, and try to distract yourself from the shark-finned thought that goes </span><em><span>What if I’m pregnant for years and years? What if I just stay like this, and people start to point and whisper and then stop pretending to be polite? What if I never lay, and the weight and the need never stop?</span></em></p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <span>At least Melusine does something about the horniness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A fair amount of the time, of course, “doing something” means turning it from a dull ache that has you half-hard more often than not into a burning, piercing need that has you climbing on the bed, your swollen belly hanging below you, and lifting your hips in wanton display until Mel deigns to use its tongue on you or grow a cock and fuck you. (You love showing her how much you need her, and you love that she’ll stoke your dependence further.) But sometimes you find yourself enjoying the low simmer, rocking your hips back and forth as you do the dishes—and then your hands brace you against the counter (or the wall, or the bedframe) and you find yourself cumming so hard you forget how to see for a minute, and you hear your wife’s delighted laughter in the back of your head as you come out of it and find yourself in desperate need of a change of panties. The knowledge not only that she </span>
  <em>
    <span>can </span>
  </em>
  <span>wrap around your sense of arousal and pull, but that she </span>
  <em>
    <span>does</span>
  </em>
  <span>, adds just that further frisson of enjoyment to going about your daily life—not only are you visibly a mother, not only are you secretly filled with a monster’s eggs, but that monster might, at any time, make you duck somewhere private and experience a little death and resurrection, pulling you entirely out of the world that all those around you inhabit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before your wife could read your mind, negotiating scenes—building the narrative arc, talking about what turned you both on, figuring out your limits—was one of your favorite parts of sex; before your wife could manage every aspect of the experience directly, talking about sex was sometimes better than the act itself. If you’d thought about it at all, you might’ve expected to miss it. But it turns out that instead, communication is so constant, and actual words so often unnecessary, that you instead throw yourself into enjoying the little surprises Melusine gives you, the ways she fulfills even your half-unconscious desires.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Right now, for instance. The two of you are sitting on a bench in the park, watching joggers and strollers and pointing out cute dogs to each other, each with ice cream in one hand and her wife’s hand in the other, when Mel starts whispering right into your head.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re such a good incubator, darling. And so good at pretending you’ve got a human child growing inside you, not a clutch of monsters that you </span>
  </em>
  <span>asked</span>
  <em>
    <span> to have fucked into you. I don’t think a single person around knows that you’re carrying my eggs…</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>… but what if they did?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You can feel a blush struggling to surface, and Mel smoothly takes more control to keep your knees from going weak.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh, I know, I know, it’s dangerous in this age of sonar and statistics. But there was a time not so long ago when my existence was—if not known, then certainly assumed. There was a time when people wouldn’t risk my wrath by acting </span>
  </em>
  <span>outright</span>
  <em>
    <span>, even if my eggs were more obvious … but oh, they’d </span>
  </em>
  <span>stare</span>
  <em>
    <span>.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I’ve done it before, you know, back when marking a woman as mine meant that to trouble her was to invite poor fishing and capsized boats, when a wife has asked me to give her an excuse to drive others away. Kept those cushions of fat from forming to hide my eggs … I’d have loved to do that to you.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You’re the first to admit that you’re not the most outgoing woman, and that one of the reasons you married Mel was that she drags you into social situations with her, that she gives you a push forward when you need it and makes the sensation of entering unknown waters into the slow fall that makes you shiver in hesitant delight instead of freeze in clenching terror. Mel praises you in your earshot, gushes about how much she loves her girlfriend/fianceé/wife, and around her you can’t help but take pride in things that you would have been ashamed of. Melusine saying it wishes it could be more obvious about the pregnancy is another repetition of that pattern, and you fall in love with it again on the spot.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>As I was saying… they’d be too afraid of me to </span>
  </em>
  <span>hurt</span>
  <em>
    <span> you, but, well. Humans will be humans. You’d be so very obviously mine. I’d make you wear your hair up, show off where I wrapped myself around your spine, and they’d whisper whenever you turned away, about how you couldn’t be content with a mortal, no, you had to go and make yourself a plaything for something deep and dark and monstrous.</span>
  </em>
  <span> Mel sounds—not smug, exactly, but like it’s delighting in how painting a picture of itself as so much more powerful than you, as something that will take you and use you, makes you shiver. </span>
  <em>
    <span>You had to go and get yourself caught, darling, and they’d pity you, maybe, or look on in awe and maybe just a hint of jealousy. Look at you like the precious, untouchable, strange, wild thing you are. They’d see just how thoroughly I’ve wrecked you. They’d be so precisely, excruciatingly polite to your face, because they’d never be sure if they were talking to you… or to me.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Your breath catches, your heart runs quickly, and you barely manage a few licks of ice cream that somehow doesn’t melt in your hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>And you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you, darling? You’d enjoy being seen, being special, being singled out, with just a hint of delicious shame mixed in. You’d get off on everyone knowing that you let a monster claim you and fuck you and fill you with its get, knowing about your complete failure to be content with normality. You’d think about how they’d probably see you as a sort of necessary sacrifice, almost uncomfortable to be reminded of, and then I’d flood you with pleasure and you’d take pride in being a good little incubator, in keeping your town safe, in doing your duty to something bigger and stronger and wiser, no matter what anyone else might think of you.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>You have to let Mel hold your ice cream while you wrap your arms around it and whine. It’s right and you both know it and you feel small and helpless and loved. Melusine pats you on the back and kisses the top of your head and steals a bite of your ice cream. You suspect that might have been one of her goals all along.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Being an incredibly long-lived eldritch sea monster able to pass for human comes with certain perks, such as the ability to really take advantage of compound interest and work primarily for show and something to do with one’s time. Around the time you start to feel slight stirrings of movement inside you, Mel drops its various volunteer projects and throws herself into caring for you and the house. </span>
  <em>
    <span>This has got to be the cleanest it’s ever been</span>
  </em>
  <span>, you muse while Mel whistles as she sweeps, but with just enough mismatched furniture and off-kilter pillows to feel like a place people actually live. And the larger you grow, the more Melusine fusses. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well, you’d call it fussing if it wasn’t so welcome; as it is, it’s a relief to quit your job (“we’ve decided it just makes more sense for me to stay home with the baby,” Melusine lies to your coworkers through your mouth). It wouldn’t be the best for your mental health to stay in bed, so she picks you up so easily you’re pretty sure she’s grown some extra muscles just for the task and carries you to the couch, the back porch, the kitchen table. Early on, it’s a goof, and you insist on walking yourself -- you don’t want to get </span>
  <em>
    <span>entirely </span>
  </em>
  <span>out of shape -- but as time wears on and your clutch drags more heavily on your abdomen, you become more and more grateful for Melusine’s presence. Eventually, it doesn’t even let you pick up the things you drop (</span>
  <em>
    <span>I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself, darling</span>
  </em>
  <span>), and the helplessness makes you blush and squirm. Her constant presence reminds you that she was the one who put you in this position, that your gravid belly isn’t just one of </span>
  <em>
    <span>your </span>
  </em>
  <span>deepest desires fulfilled but something you’re doing for </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and the want and pride behind her eyes when she looks at you makes you want to close your eyes and hum.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She cooks with you, tending to the oven that you can’t bend over to inspect, and, increasingly, for you, while you sit on the couch with a book. You still work together to make recipes, more elaborate now that you have the free time; you may not be able to get to the Asian market anymore to fulfill your desperate need for fresh seafood, but with her sending the images directly to your optic nerves, you don’t need to. She sings lullabies to you when it’s dark and you can’t find a comfortable position to sleep in and to the growing brood inside you whenever they get particularly squirmy, and turns down the pain to make the whole thing manageable. Sometimes the lullabies are songs you know; sometimes they’re older, with Breton lyrics that she translates for and teaches you; sometimes they’re not in a language suited to human throats, but one that stirs something dark and nameless and lovely inside you.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She massages lotion into the overstretched skin of your abdomen, the spots in your lower back sore from carrying the weight, your feet that tire from even a few moments of standing. She helps you into the bathtub and carefully washes every inch of your skin, always paying special attention to the sensitive bits between your legs; she conditions, combs, braids your hair. She runs her hands over you often, sometimes with her eyes closed, like she’s trying to memorize your body by touch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You watch more movies, draw more, read more, write more, than you feel like you ever have in your life, constant undertone of sex and neediness notwithstanding; you can’t help thinking of the drawings and stories that flow from your pencil as your brood’s older siblings. You also spend a fair amount of time curled up with your head in Melusine’s lap, listening to stories of its life, its explorations, its past wives. Melusine is a historical and literal leviathan, and you’re as enthralled by its description of the secrets of the sea as you are by its description of mundane life throughout the centuries—the stuff that doesn’t make its way into the history books, that lets you feel connected to the living people of the past. Even though your home is mostly just you and Mel (and the few friends you invite over to dinner every so often, and the Internet), it still feels full of life.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And when the eggs hatch inside you, so do you.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Monday: This one was mostly my darling co-author's, so be sure to let zir know how much you love it! Next chapter we get back into my wheelhouse; brace yourselves for fluffy body horror and the glorious weight of history, dear readers.</p><p>poodle: Monday vastly underestimates their contributions; I may be really good at the domestic stuff but they hammer the sex bits home. (My apologies to any good, dear friends who may see themselves reflected in this; no apologies for the blatant wish-fulfillment or "jam-packed with preserves".)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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